Loading up on the cheese sauce in DREAM OF A RAREBIT FIEND (1906), based on the Winsor McCay comic strip. This picture was the hit of the year for the Edison company, selling nearly 200 prints, double the previous year's top hit.
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Rarebit, a cheese sauce for cheap stoners. It was quite elegant compared to today's cheese sauce squirted out from pumps over nacho chips and other ballpark delicacies.
Rarebit could mean a lot of things in American cuisine at the time. Everyone seemed to agree on cheese, mustard and ale with toast (and its strong flavors could bring about a headache and nightmares!) but the assembly methods varied. I have seen open-faced grilled cheeses and rarebit lasagnas!
Interesting. Welsh Rarebit or Rabbit is still a Sunday night supper staple here in Maine, USA. Usually just cheddar, maybe some beer, over toast or Saltines. I’m pretty sure my old state cooperative extension cookbook has the bread and cheese bake recipe in it, too.
Culturally, rarebit was seen as a bachelor's dish. The chafing dish was kind of the bbq of Gilded Age America: a suitable Man's Cooking Implement. And rarebit used common ingredients that could be made without aid of servants, ideal after a bender-- but watch those nightmares!
A humorous piece from 1901 discusses "the Chafing Dish Man" who is the ancestor to the "BBQ Dad"
They cook with their one implement and nothing else, leaving all kitchen matters to their wife, and expect effusive praise even if they are not so generous with their own spouse.
It's really good if you start the sauce by making a medium roux with butter. I always broil it, though - I'm curious what a chafing dish would have to do with it. Based on the clip, they prepare a ton of sauce and spoon it on toast - but it browns really nicely under the broiler. Now i'm hungry.
That does sound fun. It's possible it started in Wales around the hearth, so a social food more than something prepared in the kitchen then brought to the table.
yeah, my understanding is that originally it was a dig at Welsh people who couldn't afford rabbit. But, the continuation without the Welsh or other connotation seems like it was either understood to be demeaning, or it really meant rabbit done real dirty in the culinary way
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They cook with their one implement and nothing else, leaving all kitchen matters to their wife, and expect effusive praise even if they are not so generous with their own spouse.
The more things change
Traditional masculinity is dead.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dream_of_the_Rarebit_Fiend
Though, the idea that cheese sauce is such an agreed upon substitute for rabbit really says something about the icky cooking practices of the time